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Broadcast TV = Wireless TV
Here’s an idea on how to bring broadcast TV into the 21st Century, at least in the minds of that most desirable of all audiences: the 18- to 24-year-old, digitally dominated viewer.
Call it “wireless TV.”
This is a calling-card concept bouncing around Washington, D.C., where the CTAM Summit is being held today, the National Association of Broadcasting is based and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association is headquartered.
In fact, it was executives of NCTA member organizations who went to Asia earlier this year and noticed what would be considered a phenomenon here in the States: Lots of people were watching video on their phones.
But it wasn’t coming over the mobile-phone networks. The TV signals were being broadcast.
From its start, broadcast TV has been a wireless medium. It’s “over-the-air” transmission of sound and sight.
Now, the broadcast industry has a chance to take the approach of a marketer and rebrand itself. Move to the vernacular of the time. “Wireless TV” is eminently more likely to make a connection with teen-agers — and maybe even their phone-, iPod- and Treo-dependent parents.
The opportunity is just sitting there. Samsung, for instance, is working on technology that allows broadcasters to transmit a mobile digital-TV signal on the same frequency as currently is used for standard television broadcasting.
Samsung is also the progenitor of phones used in Asia to receive broadcast signals and display them on their screens, as if the handset really were just another portable TV.
And mobile phones are, by far, the communication device of choice for the up-and-coming generation of viewers. As Stuart Collingwood, vice president in Europe of Sling Media puts it, “Teen-agers would rather cut off their hands than give up their mobile phones.”
Now is the right time to rebrand the business because of that word, “digital.” Broadcasters are gearing up for the forced switchover of all their signals from analog waves to digits Feb. 17, 2009.
Working with electronics makers to widely distribute broadcast, er, wireless-TV phones is the kind of practical, tangible event that would signal to the population at large that a big change is at hand, so to speak, and that broadcasters are taking charge of the change.
Millions of the phones and other “stationary” digital-TV sets could, in part, be co-marketed with manufacturers as mechanisms to ensure that all the offerings of local TV-station operators are received and seen. These sets would automatically receive all digital channels that the operators create and market.
You become a multichannel-video-service operator. You become a mobile-TV operator. You become relevant and cool. And you aren’t dependent on a wire to get into all of the homes — and hands — in your market.
Just a thought.
